I can't promise pictures of Mount Rainier

These collard greens are what started the meal:

I don't know if there's an incorrect way to fix collards, and greens in general. In my home, they traditionally have gone into a cast iron skillet and prepared as suggested by an old edition of The Joy of Cooking, a copy of the book that I searched bookstores for over a year to find, in San Francisco and Seattle, but the fact of the matter is that everybody else who values their Joy of Cooking has an old edition too, and they also had to search bookstores for a year or more to find it -- knowing that the new, revised edition doesn't have a lot of the general information that makes it invaluable, so they hold onto it, and probably we have to wait for someone's sweet grandmother to pass before one shows up in the bookstore so that receiving one is a bit bittersweet, which is maybe why the collards recipe in there is so good. I alter the recipe from that original one in the book to what I have in the fridge at the time: often there's horseradish from my mother's neighbor's yard in there, put through a food processor and then soaked in brine and apple cider vinegar, but some other ingredients that often get into the skillet are onions, garlic, apples; they're all chopped up and then put into the cast iron with some olive oil until the sugars begin to brown, then I toss in the collards, which have been chopped into ribbons, and the lid put on until they cook down. The Joy of Cooking, if I remember correctly, suggests a dollop of sour cream served with it, which wouldn't be terrible at all, though I've never tried it in spite of the wonderful sour cream impostors that are made and sold in the supermarket.

But in the interest of trying, not a raw, but maybe a less cooked version of collards, I used these greens to make into wraps. There are raw suggestions collard wraps, but none of the wraps that I saw videos of hugged the stuffing as much as I wanted them to. I cut the blades from their midrib, if I'm using those terms correctly, and then blanched the leaves -- twenty seconds in boiling water, and then into a colander to cool while I mixed a bowl of the stuffing together: carrot greens, quinoa, beats, and I placed this mix next to mushrooms that I bought at the Korean market and sauteed in oil and lime juice, and some carrots that I cut lengthwise.

A peanut sauce I made from peanut butter, Veganaise, the water that had soaked some mushrooms, apple cider vinegar, dill, salt, pepper... there may have been a splash of soy sauce in there somewhere. I get to putting things into that glass jar to shake up, and I can't remember anything. The problem is that I'm not paying attention while I do it, brain 2,500 miles away deep in the blue of a lake moving like the electricity from a wave. Then I come back and my arms are slightly tired and the sauce jarringly mixed.

Anyway, who cares about a recipe. Surely, this is what made fast food eateries successful: the ability to make a million of the same thing, exactly the same -- but I was told once that dishwear and furniture with defects, places where a hand slipped or glassware that would make the glass-blowing master of Murano ashamed, I was told that these items had become sought after because they showed off that a human had made them, a human had touched them during the creation. And I realize that I'm poo-pooing recipes after I mentioned that I looked long and hard for a copy of The Joy of Cooking, but after I found that copy of the book, I may have followed the recipe once, just one time to learn how to cook the greens, then the book never opened to that page ever again, yet I've never had a bad bunch of greens from that skillet. And I'll admit that I've opened to the same page a few times in order to learn and relearn proportions for making pie, but... well, no but... I use that page every time I bake a pie. Though the fruit I'll often pair with other, nontraditional ingredients such as blueberries and ginger; that pie turned out wonderfully, and I have ideas about apple, basil and some cheesy-impostor-something.

The best part of eating dinner: the people whom you eat with.

Almost as good as the company: Resplendent Laura's the rhubarb pie. 

A distant third is the view of Mount Rainier, mother of the city of Seattle, from the back porch.

(pictured here is Exquisite Sarah looking at Mount Rainier)